By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. and Kurdish forces completed their conquest of northern Iraq (news - web sites) Friday by taking Mosul without a fight, but Baghdad and other captured cities descended into anarchy.
The fall of Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, left Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s home town of Tikrit, 110 miles north of Baghdad, as the last significant target for the United States.
U.S. bombers continued to pound positions around the town but Saddam's whereabouts were not known.
In Baghdad, Mosul and the southern city of Basra, law and order (news - Y! TV) crumbled as pent-up passions spilled on to the streets after 24 years of iron rule by Saddam.
In Baghdad, gunmen apparently from the Shi'ite Muslim community in the east-side slums battled paramilitaries loyal to Saddam overnight, U.S. military sources said.
Armed men roamed the streets, robbing buildings and hijacking cars.
In the city center this correspondent saw a youth wearing a red baseball cap back-to-front brandishing an AK-47 assault rifle and waiting for a passing car to hijack.
He let me go by, but shot the driver of the next vehicle, dragged him out and drove away in the truck.
"Is this your liberation?" screamed one shopkeeper at the crew of a U.S. Abrams tank as youths helped themselves to everything in his small hardware store.
Reuters journalists in Mosul said they saw no military battles after Iraq forces abandoned the city but crowds went on a looting rampage, stripping public buildings and schools, and torching a central market.
Looting also raged in Basra, where British troops on Friday killed five men trying to rob a bank.
TROOPS AS POLICE
The anarchy in Iraq's main cities, and the murder of a religious leader on Thursday in the holy city of Najaf, highlighted the problems U.S. troops face in restoring order after a crushing military victory.
"The United States have neither the will nor the capacity to rein in the disorder in Iraq," said Bruno Tertrais, senior fellow at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research.
"Today there are not nearly enough forces in the towns. Secondly, they are tired after three weeks of war."
Analysts have also said U.S. forces were reluctant to perform policing missions but a U.S. officer disagreed.
"Now we are a little bit out of our comfort zone, but we're not unprepared or untrained," Lieutenant-Colonel Jim Chartier, commanding officer of the U.S. Marines' 1st Tank Battalion, told Reuters near Baghdad's Martyrs' Monument.
"If I need to provide security for a grocery store so they don't get robbed, I'll do it. On the other hand, there's still people out there who want to kill us, so we can't let our guard down," he said.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer (news - web sites) said it is too early to declare victory in Iraq but he said Saddam's control of the country has "all but disappeared."
U.S. commander General Tommy Franks, visiting Afghanistan (news - web sites), said Saddam and his inner circle were "either dead or running like hell."
Brigadier General Vincent Brooks said at a briefing in Qatar U.S. troops were issued with a wanted list of 55 people to be captured or killed. He said there were indications Iraqi leaders may be trying to flee abroad.
A U.S. aircraft dropped six "smart bombs" on the residence of Barzan Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother and former head of Iraq's Mukhabarat intelligence service.
The results of the attack at Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, were not immediately known.
NORTHERN ADVANCES
In Mosul, 240 miles north of Baghdad, the entire Iraqi 5th Corps surrendered, U.S. Central Command said in Qatar. "We're in the process of deciding whether they'll become (prisoners of war) or just go home," Captain Frank Thorp said.
Troops of the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade moved to take control of the strategic northern prize of Kirkuk from Kurdish guerrillas, who captured it with U.S. special forces on Thursday.
The U.S. soldiers began spreading through the nearby oilfields, which provide 40 percent of Iraq's oil revenue.
The Kurds' withdrawal from their traditional capital is designed to calm fears in Ankara that they could use the city's wealth to finance an independent state and stimulate separatist demands by Turkey's large Kurdish minority.
HEALTH CRISIS
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said Baghdad's medical system had all but collapsed due to combat damage, looting and fear of anarchy. It said in a statement, few medical or hospital support staff were reporting for work and patients had either fled or been left without care.
A Reuters witness said bodies were being buried in hospital gardens and dozens of corpses rotted by roadsides or in cars blown up by coalition forces as they captured Baghdad earlier in the week.
"This is going to cause a major problem for sanitation and the water system," a U.S. army engineer officer told Reuters.
"The water table is very low here and what goes in the ground, goes in the water," he said.
The United States is trying to organize a meeting of Iraqi opposition leaders to start selecting an interim government.
Central Command in Qatar said on Friday that White House special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad would chair a meeting of prominent Iraqis in the coming week to discuss Iraq's future.
"The majority of the people attending will be from inside Iraq and there will also be attendees from outside Iraq returning to their country," spokesman Thorp said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites), French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder met in St. Petersburg on Friday and reiterated their call for United Nations (news - web sites) to take control of the Iraq issue.